Ocado Group plc has commercially partnered with Oxbotica Ltd, headquartered in Oxford. Ocado will invest £10m in Oxbotica as part of Oxbotica’s latest Series B equity funding round, which included other strategic and financial investors in the UK, the US, China and Australia. Ocado will take a seat on Oxbotica’s board.
The purpose of the partnership is to collaborate on hardware and software interfaces for autonomous vehicles, enhancing and integrating Oxbotica’s autonomy software platform into a variety of vehicles.
Potential use cases range from vehicles that operate inside of Ocado’s Customer Fulfilment Centre (CFC) buildings and the yard areas that surround them, all the way to last-mile deliveries and kerb-to-kitchen robots.
This will be a multi-year collaboration and the ultimate ambition is to enable Ocado’s partners that use the Ocado Smart Platform (OSP) to reduce the costs of last-mile delivery and other logistics operations.
As part of this...